Do you mistreat your car? Does your car mistreat you? Are you one of those people who washes the car each and every weekend? Are you having trouble getting rid of your current car?

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

Answers

I feel so much better about my car now. Thank you.

I've actually reached a point where I sheepishly beg off driving anywhere for lunch because I don't want people to see, among other things, the bizarre stain on the front seat from the Route 66 Cherry Coke that an ex-roommate spilled two years ago, but still looks fresh. You're not along in your disgustingness. Everytime I look in the trunk, I realize I just can't have nice things.

A handy tip from my escapades in car slobbishness: Never leave a dead battery in your hatchback, in a cardboard box on top of a bunch of clothes you tossed back there, for 6 months while you 'get around' to taking it to be recycled. No one ever mentioned to my non-mechanical self that batteries emit secret battery-waves that eat holes in all the surrounding cloth, paper, carboard and carpet. Apparently batteries are just like giant moths that eat everything and just happen to start your car. Who knew?

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

Rather than give you the whole sordid story, I'll just give the URL, hmm? ;) (Yes, my old (sold) car has his own webpage.) I've been meaning to update the page, explaining exactly where Ol Blue is now, but I just haven't gotten around to it. =/

Here is the page with all the pictures. It's not linked to the other pages... Something else I have to get around to. This is the main page - there are stories, a list of bumper stickers, stories about the old guy (like the time I accidently locked myself out my my RUNNING car)... Yeah, I had too much time on my hands. =)

she's actual size

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

This is soo cool... Pamie your car looks like my last one did AFTER it was stolen and trashed lol. My current car is only slightly better in appearance though

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

My first car was a 1989 Pontiac Sunbird. It was so adorable, and the emergency brake was the perfect spot to stick a cd player, at least it was, until my cd player got stolen. Anyway. That car was a trash heap. This was before the parents knew that I smoked, so no cigarette butts or cigarette-type trash, but approximately three hundred Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and SueBee Honey bottles on the floor of the backseat. After that car got totalled by my sister on her way to work, I got the 1985 Dodge Aries. Ugh.

Anyway, that car got a shit ton of bottles in the back seat of that, and by that point (my senior year of high school) I didn't give a shit if Mom and Dad saw my cigarette trash, but I still tried to be slightly discreet about it. Nevermind the butts and burn holes in the backseat from butts coming back int he window. Bitch. Once I got stopped at a sobriety checkpoint, and the cop shined his flashlight in the backseat to look at the bottles and another cop said "they're snapple bottles".. I guess the first guy thought maybe that they were alcoholic or something like that. But whatever.

Yeah, my car was always a mess, and cleaning it out before I went to college was a joke.. but I always had a change of clothes and a pair of sneakers in the trunk, and a stash of tampons in the glove compartment, and a place to ash when it was super duper cold outside. Sometimes the trash is nice.

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

Wow, I'm feeling like part of a car abuse support group. I have to confess to the mistreatment of my car. I bought it used, and after just a few months it broke down..the turbo went out, which is almost $2000 to fix. So I just kept driving it. In retaliation for its misbehaviour, I have not gotten the oil changed since I bought it almost 2 years ago. Oh, I make sure it HAS oil, but I refuse to change it. Take that, stupid car. And instead of fixing it, I bought a cell phone so I can call for help when the engine explodes and leaves me stranded. I'm Smart with a capital S, baby! I don't think I've washed it for a year now...but I did put a happy yellow smiley face on the antenna.

-- Anonymous, April 05, 2000

My previous car was almost that bad. I had piles of things in the back seat - papers I had to work on for classes, term papers to grade, miscellaneous information for the club I was running, or the non-profit I was in. I had assorted receipts and other bits of trash that I would just toss into the back seat. My friends would curl their noses at my car and ask in freezing tones just exactly when it was that I thought I would be cleaning it. My trunk was always full of junk too. I had this big wad of peacock feathers, for example, that basically lived in my trunk for nearly 2 years.

When I bought my brand new car I made a promise to myself that I would not do this anymore. So far, I've been pretty good. Okay, so the AD&D handbook and all my character sheets and dice sort of have a permanent residence in the backseat, but besides that, it's clean. I'm not sure quite how I've managed it, but (fingers crossed), I'm looking at it as a sort of test to see how long it will last.

Now if I could just do the same thing with my house....my dining room table is sort of buried these days.....

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

1985 Toyota Tercel Wagon. Light Blue. I call her Blue Death.

What's on the floor of my car?

Snackwell Bar wrappers

plastic grocery bags

gum wrappers

gum wrappers *with* old gum in them

handwritten directions to basically anywhere I've had to travel to in the last 5 years

A Pop Will Eat Itself cassette single

An Ella Fitzgerald Cassette

Empty Waterbottles

children's books

an ice scraper

the paper cups from many a cupcake/muffin

a blue sweatshirt

And lastly a vanilla air freshener. My car hasn't smelled the same since the engine coolant spilled back into the interior when she was towed about 4 years ago.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I should have known better than name my car Delilah...

She was a 92 Dodge Shadow ES with an attitude, and we had an agreement. I could throw all the trash i wanted to on the floor, and she wouldn't say a thing about that can of cherry coke that had exploded all over the back seat. In exchange, I had to put in new speakers, drive around blasting Metallica or Joan Jett, and never ever play anything by Ricky Martin or any of those boy bands.

One day, my friend decided she was going to play her new Ricky Martin cd. I turned it off as soon as I knew what was going on, but it was too late. I had gone back on my agreement with Delilah.

The following weekend, as I went to get out of the car, the door swung shut and gave me a black eye. A few weeks after that, she took it upon herself to rearend a car on the highway, and try to break my nose with the air bag. I just couldn't trust her anymore.

I had to trade her in a month later. RIP Delilah...

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

it's not so much that my car can be littered with peppermint patty wrappers and driving instructions, it's that i totally humilate her. she's a 1987 nissan sentra, and the previous owner had her lovely red painted an even lovely sparkly raspberry. she be BRIGHT. then, SOMEONE put an "all people suck" bumper sticker. then the downfall... i glued hula dancers, a frog, a duckie, butterflys, a horse, little pigs, and a fresh-out-of-the-fiesta-sticker-machine of a saint and baby jesus with cool reflecting abilities on the dash. i think it finally shriveled from the heat and fell off.

i think my car wishes i were cooler, but she's in really good shape and i love her dearly. if only i can remember what i named her...

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

At a a glance, like if you passed my car in a parking lot and snuck a quick peek INSIDE (we'll get to the outside in a minute), you would probably think it was pretty decent. If you actually got IN my car, however, it would be a totally different story.

The dust on the dashboard has begun forming bunnies that flap around when the defroster is on. I don't smoke, so the ashtray is used to hold masses of empty Pixy Stix wrappers. Under both seats you will find Dunkin Donuts bags, wadded up napkins, Whipper Snapple bottles strategically held in place by the seat adjustment bar, and Frappucino lids. I usually try to remove the actual Frappucino bottles once a week, because they clang around too much when they roll around on the floor. Somehow, the lids always end up under the seat.

My drink holders usually have a coating of stickiness on the bottom, as a result of something spilling over inside them. I once had two pennies and a key imbedded in that stickiness, and it was a real bitch to get them out, to the point that I considered getting a proffessional from the Car Wash down the street involved. I decided against it, because I would be too embarassed to let him see the condition of my car.

My console is crammed with ready-to-be-eaten Pixy Stiks, and there is plenty of Pixy Dust on the bottom from the ones who managed to split open. There's also a beat up Peter Gabriel tape, "So", which hasn't had a case in years, as well as the insert to the Toad the Wet Sprocket "Dulcinea" cd, although neither the cd nor the case are in my car. My broken cd player is wrapped up in it's own cord, and will be dealt with later. There's loose change, gum wrappers and gas receipts floating around in there to spice things up a bit.

My trunk is the place where things go to die. No matter how carefully I place something back there, no matter how painstakingly the box has been packed, or the bag has been tied, eventually everything that goes in the trunk gets ruined. Because I forget about it. The moment I close it - forgotten. I have found long, lost (soiled with I don't want to know what) clothes, photo albums torn to shreds, boots scuffed all to hell, and paperbacks battered nearly beyond recognition in my trunk, and always I kick myself for forgetting them. I apologize to each thing, as I gently lift it out and carry it to the garbage can. Anything that enters the trunk comes out beaten to a bloody pulp because I drive at least 100 miles per day, and make many violent stops and quick turns which causes everything in the trunk to get rolled around as if it's in the 'heavy' cycle in the dryer. I once put a bag of grapefruit back there. With a wreath. When I noticed the smell and realized what had happened, I was truly terrified to open the trunk and face what I'd done. As I removed the carcasses, I vowed to be more considerate of the things that I didn't want to destroy, so now I try and put the fragile and/or perishable stuff in the back seat. It works, when I remember.

Let's not even talk about the exterior. I'll put it this way - I look forward to rainy days because that's the only way my car ever gets a bath. People have commented on it. It's not pretty.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I'm pretty nice to my car, but only because it's new. And I'm not nearly as nice to it as the crazy warranty lady at the VW dealership wanted me to be. You know after you buy a new car, they walk you through several different rooms: in one room you sign your life away on the far-too-expensive payments; in another room, you get your keys; in another room you get Granny Gear and her half-hour lecture on "how to take care of your car, young lady".

In addition to all of my warranty materials and my car handbook, Granny Gear gave me a box of nasty car soap and car wax which leaked all over the rear passenger side floor mat before I ever got a chance to use them. My parents happened to be visiting the weekend I bought the car (and indeed, encouraging me to buy a "nice safe new car") so she kept rambling on to them how "this little lady is going to be outside washing and polishing her car every weekend". Ha. I have not yet been to the car wash, although I consider it every time I drive past one.

Actually, I'm kind of scared of car washes. Driving through all of that whirling machinery and soap gets me very claustrophobic. I've been known to beg friends to drive my car through the car wash for me while I wait outside.

I don't usually end up with food wrappers, etc. littering my car, except after a road trip. And I usually clean those out pretty quick. I do tend to buy (nonperishable) things and store them in my car though. Right now I've got 6 coir-lined hanging baskets that I bought a few weeks ago and that I plan to install on my patio with flowers in them, sometime. I have a bag of cat food and some boxes of cat litter that I bought last week and haven't bothered to carry up yet. I also have a coat that it got too warm to wear, an umbrella, and about 50 grocery store receipts.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

My car isn't too bad although since I have an SUV I have perfected the ability to toss anything from the front seat to the back trunk- like area.

But the hubster's car is scary. It is held together with coffee spills. Literally. I spilled some water on myself on a road trip but didn't worry too much about it. It's water, it won't stain. When we stopped a couple of hours later, I got out of the car and realized he hem of my shirt was covered in big brown stains. As was the seat of my pants. The coffee that had been spilled in the past had been liberated by the water spill and made a bid for freedom. Unfortunately, I was in the way. Blech.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

first off, you don't have to tell me i am spoiled, i know. so i have two cars. my first car is my dream car, i worship the pavement it sometimes rolls over. it is not a reliable car, a 1974 VW "thing", yellow, beautiful. i keep it in storage during the mostly icky months. there is no a/c or heater, nothing electric, i work up a sweat on a cool day just driving to work. the converable top takes a lot of muscle to get up and down, so i leave it down and have had holes drilled in the floor board so when it rais it will drain (interior is vinyl and sheet metal). but i baby it, and will never ever sell it, i would live in it first. but i do neglect her at times, i have found sprouting pecan trees in the back, mold on the floor board, and i have not relaced the hub cap that went flinging into traffic (but i did go back for the hub cap, all smashed up). my most prized material object. my other car is some form of blazer, it is a piece of crap, the red headed step child to my precious baby car. i have to drive it when baby is not feeling well, why it keeps going i will never know.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I drove a 1986 Honda Civic for about oh ... I don't know ... 2 years? Almost. I treated that car like crap. I kicked things, never cleaned it. That poor thing. I totaled it and went without a car for 2 years. 2 years. That's a long time to depend on friends and a boyfriend to drive you places. It was a humbling experience to say the least. So when I got a PHAT paying job, I decided it was time to hook up the car action. I went out and bought a 1999 ... Honda Civic. I'm a Honda customer for life. I love my car. I clean it more often than I do myself. Honestly. (i.e. more than once a day for those not counting at home.) I'm anal retentive by nature anyway, but my car has just pushed that aspect of my personality to new heights. I can't STAND it when people refuse to put their garbage in the trash bag that clearly says, "Don't Mess with Texas"; the same goes for my car. (I have a bunch of "Don't Mess with Texas" trash bags, I'm just using them all over and over again until they become encrusted with goopy soda leftovers and food, or they get holes in them.) I wash my car every weekend, sometimes more than that because I hate to see fingerprints on the windows or little crusty remnants of what used to be a bug on my winshield.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

OK, I'll be the first to admit that my car is hardly the paragon of cleanliness. I typically ignore those annoying little door dings and scratches, and have a tendency to "clean" my car on the weekends by taking all of the wrappers, directions, empty cups, empty cigarette boxes, etc., and toss them in my trunk. I park outside in my driveway, and we're in rainy season, and I count the showers as car washes. So, from the eye of the innocent bystander, I have a decent- looking vehicle. Little do they know that my trunk is a cesspool. There are probably creatures living back there. Who knows.

However, after this weekend, things might have changed a little bit. I took my car downtown to hear a local band play (that was phrased poorly, I know - the car didn't actually get to see the show) and squeezed into a VERY tight spot in front of the club. I used to own an Escort, and I performed parallel parking miracles with that car -- I now own a Neon, and while it's still small, it is bigger than my previous one. Unfortunately, I'm still convinced that I can fit into the same-sized spaces.

Anyway, I left the club at about two in the morning, and lo and behold, keyed into the hood of my car in about one foot high letters was the word "PRICK." Uh. I drove home practically in tears. $300 later, the car looks fabulous from the outside. I've now become one of those idiots who parks two miles away from the Wal-mart in order to avoid possible door dings and such, because the paranoia I experienced as a result of being keyed freaked me out. My father would be so proud.

That is, until he peeked into my trunk.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

my first car was a $600 '86 mustang convertible. my dad and i did soooo much work to that car, i babied it, even when it was temperamental in the rain (and it's top leaked and the defroster was broken, so i used an old beanie baby that i had had for ages to wipe my windsheild, and since it was a resident of my car, its tag was ripped off and it had a cigarette burn in its ear. come to find out the stupid thing, in perfect condition, would have been worth about a thousand dollars and i could have bought a new defroster for that, but anyway...) then, i went to college and my brother drove it. a week and a half after getting his liscence he totalled it. then we got fletcher, an 87 honda civic. he was tan with a tan naugahyde interior, manual and had personality out the wazoo. for some reason, although fletcher (i named him, even) had been mine, my brother took him over and wouldn't let me drive him very often. younger brother are the best. then, last summer, i became mommy to casper, a 96 white ford ranger. oh, he is beautiful... i take good care of him, but since i am an art major, he always has canvas or sketchbooks or art boxes or whatever behind his seats, and sometimes spilling over to the passenger's side. but he's a good truck, we get along wonderfully well, i love him to bits. for christmas, i was given a tool box for the back and an anchor system. it was a good christmas. :) we have had many road trips together, and i am always very careful to not burn him with my cigarettes, or even use the ash tray, lest he start to smell like butts. he's my baby. and no, my brother is NOT allowed to drive him.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

My first car was a 1969 Mercedes. (This was in 1988.) It was bad ass. I couldn't stop at stop signs for fear it would stall and I would have to sit there for 20 minutes to get it started again.

Smoke blew out the back of it. It ran on regular leaded gas which, by that time, no one sold anymore. I loved it.

My next car was a 1986 Nissan 200 SX. We called it the sex machine though, to my knowledge, no one ever had any thing approximating sex in it. Although, my friend Leigh did make out with a date in the backseat once while we drove to a party.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

You are such a good truckyes you aregood boy. I know you are to small to pull the boat, but I love you anyway. Here you go boyhave an STP gasoline treat. You are all mine nowthat mean old Mazda Finance company cant come take you wayno they cantDaddy paid off those mean old fuddy duddies. I knowI knowYou need new tires. And a serpentine belt. And there are paw prints on the seat and slobber trails on your window. No Come on now dont stall on me. Didnt I just take you to see those nice oil change people? Gave you a new air filter? Huh? Okgood truck. Come on, buddylets go check out those foxy little Miatas

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

My car looks just like Pamie's, except mine is worse. If Pamie is disgusting, than I am the queen of disgusting. And to make matters worse, my husband is a car freak. He washes it every week, there is never an ounce of trash on the floor, no dust on the dash. His car always smells like yummy car freshener, mine smells like stale cigarettes and something else....I think maybe curdled milk or something equally gross from some cup in the back seat. I have papers, business cards and pictures frames from when I moved out of my old office at my old company back in Oct. of 99. In the trunk are sweaters, jeans, jackets, and shoes from when I moved back in May of 98. I also have a few trash bags back there that I think contain shoes and a slip that my friend loaned me to go under my wedding dress, I never used them and never returned them. Half of our drinking glasses are in my back seat, some with dried cereal or oatmeal in the bottom. (See? I am one sexy bitch driving my car, oh yeah.) I have tapes stuffed in the front console, but they are useless because I have had a CD player since Christmas. There are clothes all over my passenger seat and the backseat. A lint brush is stuffed along side the tapes because by the time I get out of my house (dog) and out of my car (hell hole) I usually need it. My front windshield is cracked. I am missing my right rear hubcab. Two out of Three remaining hubcabs are cracked from me running off the road or into curbs.

My husbands friends comment on the condition of my car constantly. They tell my husband he shouldn't "let" me keep my car this way, which humiliates him and makes me more of a trash rebel. It's my fucking car and I make the payments, right?

Remember that friends episode where Rebecca Stamos plays the girl with the disgusting apartment? That is me with my car.

But I think I heard somewhere that clutter is the sign of a brilliant mind. Right? Or did I make that up to make myself feel better?

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

Mis, I just read your post, and I had to share this quote with you. I have it on a t-shirt at home. My mother bought it for me; I think she was trying to be funny. I think it's beautiful! Here goes:

Disorganization is merely the sign of a very healthy individual trying to do more in a shorter period of time than those lazy, obsessively tidy types who can think of nothing better to do than straighten objects in drawers and stuff like that which only feeds their own egos and makes them think they're better than those of us who are "truly gifted".

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

Huh. Its funny that should mention messy cars. My twin sister and I share a 1994 Izuzu Trooper that used to belong to our dad. On the way home from school today (my mom had to pick me up because my sister had to work), my mother said (and this is a direct quote): "I don't think your father is mad at how you treat the car, but more like hurt, because he kept that nice for so long." Its not like my car is a pigsty! I have been in MUCH worse cars. A friend of mine barely has room for passengers because all the seats in his car are covered in clothing, water bottles, soda cans, old homework, etc. His trunk is even worse -- you open it up and there is absolutely everything imaginable in it: footballs, a bottle of juice, cups (for the juice), a change of clothes, several decks of cards... the list goes on and on. But his car looks like a piece of crap anyway.

But getting back to my car. It has a name: The Bearsmobile. You see, as I mentioned before, it belonged to my dad. We used to live in Chicago, and so my dad is a huge Bears fan. So he got a little coconut-scented hangy thing with the Bears logo on it for the mirror and for Christmas my sis and I got him a Bears license plate for the front of the car. Hence the name, Bearsmobile. My friends think I'm insane. Also, my car has a 3 week old chocolate stain in the front seat, thanks to my sister and her boyfriend. They were going to his house with some chocolate frosted cake and, it spilled. She still hasn't cleaned it up and we have it covered with a towel. The back is pretty neat, with the excpetion of my little sister's bathing suit, a bottle of gel (I have no idea whose it is -- I think one of our friend's), the cover of a chem lab manual and some papers.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I used to be pretty nice to my car, but then it got stolen and the thieves wrecked it, and things have never been the same between us. I mean, I try to forget, but I just keep thinking about strangers touching it ... fonding the stereo ... driving it to places I've never even been. I know it's wrong of me to blame the car, but I just can't get that picture out of my mind.

So now my car makes your car look spotless, Pamie. Plus I've been driving around on the spare for three days. And I don't even care.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

Back when I had my own Mazda Protege (before it was stolen . . . eh I live in DC, you gotta be a victim of crime sometime), I treated my car like crap too.

I worked as an investigator which meant that my car was my office and home away from home and it had all the amenities. I kept a box full of files in the trunk. I always had workout gear complete with tennis shoes in case I got the urge to go for a run. There was always a pile of subpoenas in the front passenger seat. There were more copies of the Washingtonpost in the backseat than I can even comprehend. (read paper, throw in back seat, ever think about it again). I had this Wally Wheel thing used to measure distances in the trunk also. I had a walkman and some tapes under the driver's seat. That doesn't count all the used waterbottles and who knows what that I don't remember.

One day I got tired of the mess and cleaned it up. I took out all the newspapers, waterbottles, etc. from the back seat. I took the workout gear inside. The next day I woke up and went outside to discover that my car wasn't there.

Morale of the story: A filthy car makes a decent car burglar proof. Don't clean the car Pamie!! no!!!!!

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I drive a 1993 Geo Prizm, the car I've had since my senior year of high school. I've loved this car. Hard.

I don't remember to wash it very often -- I once went two years without washing my car. I have dents in the roof, from softball-sized hailstones (yes, I did used to live in Texas), that I won't fix -- I claim they give my car character. I have a tendency to back into walls in parking garages at slow speeds -- my rear bumper has several faint textured-cement wall prints. I still have sludge on the center console from a Coke I spilled four years ago. I haven't cleaned the inside of my windshield since January 1997.

I've been meaning to buy new tires for four months. I have petrified french fries in the cracks between the seats and the console. I don't think I have any of my hubcaps anymore. I have a long scraping dent on my right front fender that I also refuse to fix. I once drove 5000 miles on a donut spare. I can't remember the last time I had a front end alignment.

Now that I can afford to actually take care of my car's mechanical needs, I've had the alternator and all the belts and hoses replaced, the brakes replaced twice. I even remember to get the oil changed on a regular basis.

I can afford a better, newer, faster, more powerful car, but I don't ever actually get around to buying one. This car has been with me through too much. Nothing really bad and expensive has happened to it yet. I figure that if I ever have to have anything major done, I'll finally convince myself to buy a new one, and shed a tear or two when I do. Or else I'll forget about owning a car and just take the bus.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

I used to have a 1988 Ford Aerostar. Well, first it was my mom's for ten or eleven years. Before THAT it belonged to someone else, but about 2 years ago it became mine. Now, saying it was a minivan isn't sufficient. No no, my van was EXTENED LENGTH. I drove it as a highschool kid. I am a very small girl. I am a bad driver. It's a BIG car. It's a foot longer than your average 'mini' van. Now, by the time I got to drive the van, it had lots of problems. The biggest one was that this puppy had a great big HOLE IN THE RADIATOR. One can't get too far in a van with a hole in the radiator. I averaged about 20 miles towards the end. My friends named my van Precious. A GIANT van with no radiator named precious. Imagine if you will, a bunch of teenagers, in a great big van, saying things like, "come on precious, come on girl, you can make it. Just over this last hill is a texaco and then you can have another gallon of antifreeze water. We rode with the heat on in july. We had no choice. The saddest thing is that I did NOT want to part with that car. I am still bitter that Precious got sold. The person who bought her, my DAD, put a new radiator in her, and now DRIVES HER AROUND. I wish I could have given her that life. I'm ver clempt, talk amoungst y'selves......:(

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2000

See? See what Katherine said?

I wasn't making it up, right?

Thanks Katherine. I am going to pass that right along to my tidy husband.

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

I've had way too many cars for someone who is barely 26. I started out with a Dodge Aries K when I was 16. I lived in suburbia so I had to have a car just to get to work, school, rehersal, etc. That got sold when I was in Ireland and I wound up with my mom's old Station Wagon. What a warhorse. A shit-brown 1986 Chevy Caprice Classic wagon. We called it the War Wagon and it's the car I drove cross country in several times. It was covered in hardcore/punk stickers. I made a U- turn in Atlanta once and didn't see that someone was coming up behind me and they slammed into my side door. I got three speeding tickets in one day driving the New York Thruway from Boston to Cleveland. I finally totalled it when I ran head on into a truck. If I were driving a smaller car I'd probably be dead.

Then I got a used Chrysler New Yorker. I had that for eight months or so. I moved to Pittsburgh in that car. When I was home for winter break the car got totalled when I was pulling out from a side street that had a HUGE snowbank on the corner that I could not see around.

I was carless for a year or so but after I graduated and started working at a suburban college I needed to get another car. I had no idea about economics, never having made more than minimum wage, so I thought - "wow, I'll be making $27K a year, I can get a new car, one that won't break down in a few months."

That was the dumbest decision I have ever made. Granted, I haven't had too many problems witht he car, and I did put over a hundred thousand miles on it in a little under three years, but the car costs my close to $650 a month between payments, gas, maintainence, insurance, and parking. That car is what has prevented me from just quitting my job and working a decent paying part time tech support job and spending more time on my writing.

The car is a 1997 neon, black. It's named Brocktung, if anyone can guess why I'll mail you a dollar. For the first two years I had it I was still pretty heavily involved with the punk scene and still running a print zine, so I would go to a couple shows a week to set up a distro table. The trunk and backseat were ALWAYS full of zines, records, a table, boxes of fliers, t-shirts, et cetera. When I was in Georgia for the School of the America's action I ran into a friend and gave her all my old zines. I then took all the CDs and sold them to a used CD store for a dollar. Not a dollar per CD, but a dollar for close to three hundred CDs. I wanted them out of my life that badly.

Now car has to be kept marginally clean simply because I am the only one of my friends who has a car, and I always have to drive on bowling night. Occasionally I have had important things in the backseat but my friends seem to think if it is in the backseat it should just be thrown on the floor and trod upon the entire trip. I now clean my car every monday before bowling.

I have a bobbing-head dog on my dashboard. I have a sticker on the back of my car that says "FIGHTING UNION!" with the notre-dame logo of the fighting irish with a black cat (a symbol of the IWW) instead of a leprechaun. Neon's have cheap plastic bumpers, like most cars, and mine got caught on the metal bumper of an old wagon this winter and got pulled off my car. I managed to reattach it with bungi chords, but the bumper itself was ripped. I patched this with duct tape and it seems to be holding. There is a big dent in my rear passenger side door from that same incident. There are innumerable small scratches on my trunk from things resting there. The same dozen tapes (Public Enemy, Portishead, Iron Maiden, Madness, Slayer, Bristle, Trial, Utah Phillips, DAvid Rovics, Youth of Today, Judge, The Fantastics, Lenny United!) have been in my car since about when I bought it and I am getting REALLY sick of them, but stify going to the mall and spending $10 or whatever on a casette. The door sensor on the rear driver's side door is broken and the car ALWAYS thinks there is a door ajar.

So that's my car.

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

I have sold three cars for a grand total of 242.50

piece of shit car 1 - '81 Red Chevette Purchased in Hidalgo(30sec walk from Mexican border) for $300.00. It died six months later and I tried to sell it to the guy who towed it for $125.00. He said "Let's split the difference." $62.50

piece of shit car 2 - '83 delta 98 diesel. Far and away the perfect car to capture all of my flyness. This thing wasn't a boat but a barge. $35.00 in Diesel would last me about a month. Cold AC. Participated in my first Hit an run in this car. I scraped a Monte Carlo..and kept on going. It desearved it. Power Steering started to fade amongst other things....sold for $100.00 to the guy who towed it.

piece of shit car 3 - '87 Mazda 626. Know as the Bad Religion Mobile because of my stickers. Wierd transimission, ugly tinting. Cool stereo.CD player stolen the day I was to see Bad Religion. Starter and ignition died. Dumped over $1200 fixing it...sold it for $80.00 to the guy who towed it.

Now I have a '98 Sentra and I take very good care of it.

Word to the wise..instead of putting your cig butts in the ashtray...try some potpouri up in that shit. You'll be amazed at how clean you car smells.

-Mical

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

I could have sworn I already posted this, but I saw Pamie's pictures, and I read Jessie's entry, and all I have to say is that y'all are a couple of pikers. I have half-empty cans of V-8 in my car that have been there since the mid-90's, okay? And I have a dog, and he sometimes throws up in the car, and we're kind of half-assed about cleaning up after him. Plus there is dog food everywhere, and really nasty dog treats, and I think a bag of carrot sticks I left there this winter.

But all that is nothing that couldn't be fixed with a trip to the auto detailers, right? Well, here's the capper: I live in a warm and occasionally wet climate, and my roof leaks. The inside of my car smells like a moldy shower curtain for six months out of every year. It's delightful.

I haven't even mentioned the fact that my front grill has been smashed in since 1996, or the big scratch that runs the entire length of the driver's side. (It happened three days after the car was painted. That was the end of my concern for my car's appearance.) Or the fact that my car is a 1988 Buick to begin with, and it's brown, which can pretty much be translated as "Beth wins."

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

My car is, quite literally, a pigsty. The floor on the passenger's side in the front always has some level of trash inhabiting it. I usually wait to empty it until it breaks from the confines of the floor and piles up to the point of spilling into the front seat.

The back seat is the resting place of any clothing that got left behind. When I put my 4-year-old in the back seat, the pile of sweatshirts and tennis shoes and bathing suits is so high she can't even see her baby sister in the carseat next to her.

The floor in the backseat is a virtual smorgasbord - long-dead popcorn, stray skittles and m&m's, petrified french fries, gum wrappers, starburt wrappers, fast food drink cups and, my personal favorite, two big blobs of maple syrup from Burger King.

On the back deck where the blown-out speakers reside you'll also find books, stuffed animal heads, dead bugs, and a high-heel shoe that I lost the partner to in 1998. I loved those damn shoes.

I'm not really a slob. Really!

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

The trunk, you ask? Oh yeah, I forgot about that...

Baby stroller, about 1/4 cup of windshield washer fluid in a totally smashed up bottle, cleaning supplies (don't laugh), 2 broken umbrellas, old happy meal toys, 2 rolls of receipt paper for the register at Blockbuster from '98, hiking boots, a tupperware container that I'm afraid to touch, a nada-chair, and an anatomy text book from my first year of college - 1987.

It's a green Saturn - much like Jessi's

-- Anonymous, April 07, 2000

But Beth....we need PICTURES!!!

Pamie asked me the other day about how my car smells....I have to say that I am at least pretty happy with the fact that since I rarely leave any sort of perishable foodstuffs in my car, there really isn't much of a smell at all. Afterall, since this is florida, most days I tie my hair back and drive with all the windows down anway (Car currently "blasting" Dag - "Apartment 635", Precious - "Precious" and Pantera "Reinventing the Steel" for after work when I Am angry).

However, I fully admit that it is quite possible that the Windex -vs- Glade Air Freshener may very well have robbed me of whatever sense of smell I once possessed.

-- Anonymous, April 08, 2000

It has always been my belief that people who have immaculate car interiors.......LITTER!! That's right!! they are the biggest LITTERBUGS I've ever seen! Now...about my car...my windshield wipers broke in 1998 and I have gotten through rain sleet and snow with a bottle of RAIN-X and a squeegee ...sure it's a pain to roll the window down and stick my squeegee out the window,especially on the "hi-way" @ 65 MPH.....but the way I see it,that is what makes me interesting!

-- Anonymous, April 18, 2000

Ok...I'll admit it, I must be sick. Do you know what have in my backseat?.....drumroll...NOTHING. Nada, zip,zero,perfectly void. No Pez dispensers, no AD&D books, no clothes, no 1001 snapple bottles...nothing. Heck, I even vacuum it once a week.

-- Anonymous, January 19, 2002